by Jack Weatherford

New York Times bestseller
Washington Area bestseller

Favorite book of Mongolians
Favorite book of Indian Prime Minister

Manmohan Singh, Indian Prime
Minister"There is very little time for reading in my new job. But of the
few books I've read, my favourite is Genghis Khan and the Making of
the Modern World by Jack Weatherford (Crown Publishers, New York).
It's a fascinating
book portraying Genghis Khan in a totally new light. It shows that
he was a great secular leader, among other things".

Enehuu sur javhlant ezenii ner Chingis khan
Erin zuundaa tereer aldar suugaa manduulj
Ene delhiin haa ch tuunees uur
Egel buhnii shuteen ugui bailaa.
(Canterbury Tales,)
Chaucer. c.1343
The King was called Genghis Khan,
Who in his time was of great renown
That there was nowhere in no region
So excellent a lord in all things

I wrote this
book for you, who are
the young people of the
Great
Mongol nation and
therefore you are the
children of Chinggis
Khaan. Everyday you
were in my heart and in
my mind as I wrote this
book.

Your ancestors
gave much to the world,
but sadly the world
gave little to
Mongolia. As an
American I wish to show
my great respect for
Chinggis Khaan and for
the contributions of
Mongolians to the
world. I hope that you
will study the life and
words of Chinggis Khaan
and that, in particular,
you will learn and
cherish the Mongol
script.

Chinggis
Khaan gave you two great
gifts. He gave you the
Great Mongol Nation, and
he gave you the Mongol
script. I hope that you
will always study and
learn from him and that
you will honor your
Mongolian scholars and
teachers who have kept
his memory and his
script alive for you.

May the Golden
Light of the Eternal
Blue Sky forever bless
the beautiful green land
of Mongolia!

IN 1937, THE SOUL of Genghis Khan disappeared from the Buddhist
monastery in central Mongolia along the River of the Moon below the
black Shankh Mountains where the faithful lamas had protected and
venerated it for centuries. During the 1930’s, Stalin’s henchmen
executed some thirty thousand Mongols in a series of campaigns
against their culture and religion. The troops ravaged one monastery
after another, shot the monks, assaulted the nuns, broke the
religious objects, looted the libraries, burned the scriptures, and
demolished the temples. Reportedly, someone secretly rescued the
embodiment of Genghis Khan’s soul from the Shankh Monastery and
whisked it away for safekeeping to the capital in Ulaanbaatar, where
it ultimately disappeared.

Through the centuries on the rolling, grassy steppes of inner
Asia, a warrior-herder carried a Spirit Banner, called a sulde,
constructed by tying strands of hair from his best stallions to the
shaft of a spear, just below its blade. Whenever he erected his
camp, the warrior planted the Spirit Banner outside the entrance to
proclaim his identity and to stand as his perpetual guardian. The
Spirit Banner always remained in the open air beneath the Eternal
Blue Sky that the Mongols worshiped. As the strands of hair blew and
tossed in the nearly constant breeze of the steppe, they captured
the power of the wind, the sky, and the sun, and the banner
channeled this power from nature to the warrior. The wind in the
horsehair inspired the warrior’s dreams and encouraged him to pursue
his own destiny. The streaming and twisting of the horsehair in the
wind beckoned the owner ever onward, luring him away from this spot
to seek another, to find better pasture, to explore new
opportunities and adventures, to create his own fate in his life in
this world. The union between the man and his Spirit Banner grew so
intertwined that when he died, the warrior’s spirit was said to
reside forever in those tufts of horsehair. While the warrior lived,
the horsehair banner carried his destiny; in death, it became his
soul. The physical body was quickly abandoned to nature, but the
soul lived on forever in those tufts of horsehair to inspire future
generations.

Genghis Khan had one banner made from white horses to use in
peacetime and one made from black horses for guidance in war. The
white one disappeared early in history, but the black one survived
as the repository of his soul. In the centuries after his death, the
Mongol people continued to honor the banner where his soul resided.
In the sixteenth century, one of his descendants, the lama Zanabazar,
built the monastery with a special mission to fly and protect his
banner. Through storms and blizzards, invasions and civil wars, more
than a thousand monks of the Yellow Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism
guarded the great banner, but they proved no match for the
totalitarian politics of the twentieth century. The monks were
killed, and the Spirit Banner disappeared.

Fate did not hand Genghis Khan his destiny; he made it for
himself. It seemed highly unlikely that he would ever have enough
horses to create a Spirit Banner, much less that he might follow it
across the world. The boy who became Genghis Khan grew up in a world
of excessive tribal violence, including murder, kidnapping, and
enslavement. As the son in an outcast family left to die on the
steppes, he probably encountered no more than a few hundred people
in his entire childhood, and he received no formal education. From
this harsh setting, he learned, in dreadful detail, the full range
of human emotion: desire, ambition, and cruelty. While still a child
he killed his older half brother, was captured and enslaved by a
rival clan, and managed to escape from his captors.

Under such horrific conditions, the boy showed an instinct for
survival
and self-preservation, but he showed little promise of the
achievements he would one day make. As a child, he feared dogs and
he cried easily. His younger brother was stronger than he was and a
better archer and wrestler; his half brother bossed him around and
picked on him. Yet from these degraded circumstances of hunger,
humiliation, kidnapping, and slavery, he began the long climb to
power. Before reaching puberty, he had already formed the two most
important relationships of his life. He swore eternal friendship and
allegiance to a slightly older boy who became the closest friend of
his youth but turned into the most dedicated enemy of his adulthood,
and he found the girl whom he would love forever and whom he made
the mother of emperors. The dual capacity for friendship and enmity
forged in Genghis Khan’s youth endured throughout his life and
became the defining trait of his character. The tormenting questions
of love and paternity that arose beneath a shared blanket or in the
flickering firelight of the family hearth became projected onto the
larger stage of world history. His personal goals, desires, and
fears engulfed the world.

Year by year, he gradually defeated everyone more powerful than
he was, until he had conquered every tribe on the Mongolian steppe.
At the age of fifty, when most great conquerors had already put
their fighting days behind them, Genghis Khan’s Spirit Banner
beckoned him out of his remote homeland to confront the armies of
the civilized people who had harassed and enslaved the nomadic
tribes for centuries. In the remaining years of life, he followed
that Spirit Banner to repeated victory across the Gobi and the
Yellow River into the kingdoms of China, through the central Asian
lands of the Turks and the Persians, and across the mountains of
Afghanistan to the Indus River.

In conquest after conquest, the Mongol army transformed warfare
into an intercontinental affair fought on multiple fronts stretching
across thousands of miles. Genghis Khan’s innovative fighting
techniques made the heavily armored knights of medieval Europe
obsolete, replacing them with disciplined cavalry moving in
coordinated units. Rather than relying on defensive fortifications,
he made brilliant use of speed and surprise on the battlefield, as
well as perfecting siege warfare to such a degree that he ended the
era of walled cities. Genghis Khan taught his people not only to
fight across incredible distances but to sustain their campaign over
years, decades, and, eventually, more than three generations of
constant fighting.

In twenty-five years, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and
people than the Romans had conquered in four hundred years. Genghis
Khan, together with his sons and grandsons, conquered the most
densely populated civilizations of the thirteenth century. Whether
measured by the total number of people defeated, the sum of the
countries annexed, or by the total area occupied, Genghis Khan
conquered more than twice as much as any other man in history. The
hooves of the Mongol warriors’ horses splashed in the waters of
every river and lake from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean
Sea. At its zenith, the empire covered between 11 and 12 million
contiguous square miles, an area about the size of the African
continent and considerably larger than North America, including the
United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, and the islands of
the Caribbean combined. It stretched from the snowy tundra of
Siberia to the hot plains of India, from the rice paddies of Vietnam
to the wheat fields of Hungary, and from Korea to the Balkans. The
majority of people today live in countries conquered by the Mongols;
on the modern map, Genghis Kahn’s conquests include thirty countries
with well over 3 billion people. The most astonishing aspect of this
achievement is that the entire Mongol tribe under him numbered
around a million, smaller than the workforce of some modern
corporations. From this million, he recruited his army, which was
comprised of no more than one hundred thousand warriors—a group that
could comfortably fit into the larger sports stadiums of the modern
era.

In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be
understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group
of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one
of its illiterate slaves, who, by the sheer force of personality,
charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule,
united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution,
established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of
warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of
commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents.
On every level and from any perspective, the scale and scope of
Genghis Khan’s accomplishments challenge the limits of imagination
and tax the resources of scholarly explanation.
http://mongoliabooks.com/thespiritbannerofgenghiskhan.php

People about his book

We could very possibly still be stuck in
the primitive world of the Middle Ages if it hadn't been for
the phenomenal brilliance, peace-seeking ambition and global
vision of the nomadic, illiterate man who grew up with the
name of Temujin and later came to be known as Genghis or
Chingiss Khan. Surrounded by loving family and friends, he
died in his bed at almost 70 years of age and immediately
one of the mourners had his life story written down. The
manuscript, known as The Secret History Of The Mongols, was
discovered in the nineteenth century in Beijing, which now
sits where Genghis Khan's capital city Zongdu was built.
Countless scholars around the world have tried to decipher
it and one did for the Germans during WW11, but the
translation was luckily destroyed in transit.

Then when Communism collapsed in 1990 and Soviet occupation
of Mongolia lifted, the homeland of Genghis Khan could
finally be visited for the first time. Many researchers came
in search of the tombs, but they were not found. The author
of Genghis Khan And The Making Of The Modern World,
Jack Weatherford, came to the deliriously-happy country as a
traveling social anthropologist and stayed for five years to
join a team of Mongolians in research that became what you
will read in his book.

Archaelogist Dr. Kh. Lkhagvasuren (student of Dr. Kh. Perlee),
Professor O. Purev, Colonel Kh. Shagdar, Political Scientist
D. Bold-Erdene and Geographer O. Sukhbaatar (covered a
million kilometers across Mongolia) were the other members
of his team. Comparing the accounts in the Secret History
with the most significant primary and secondary texts from a
dozen languages, poring over maps and debating the meanings,
they soon realized they would need to play like detectives
on a crime scene and visit the region itself. The
Introduction describes their journey back in time, for the
place was undisturbed by modern technology, and how they
conducted their research for five years.

CONTENTS

The Mongol Dynasties
Introduction

Part 1: The Reign of Terror on the Steppe--1162-1206
1 The Blood Clot
2 Tale of Three Rivers
3 War of the Khans (khan means chief)

Weatherford takes us back to when Genghis Khan was born by
Mongolia's Khentii Mountain Range near the Onon River in the
spring of 1162, the Year of the Horse (I learned what animal
each year was attributed to!). His mother Hoelun had just
married, but a hunter spied her and her husband in the
forest and decided to kidnap her. Her first child, Temujin,
belonged to the hunter and she never saw her husband again.
Temujin's father, already with one wife and son, was of a
small band that would one day be called the Mongols and he
would be poisoned and dead when Temujin was only 8 and had
just met the girl he would marry. Temujin's tribe deserted
them, then in a few years he would kill his older, ruling
stepbrother and go on the run with his large, mixed family.

Temujin ran for the mountains, was captured, made a slave
for a number of years, escaped and found the girl still
waiting for him. As soon as he married her, she was
kidnapped, but he wouldn't live without her and rescued her
with the help of a khan friend of his father's. This
incident, as Weatherford writes, 'would prove the decisive
contest that would set him on the path to greatness.'
Now Temujin realizes that he can never live a peaceful
life with his wife and family with the terrifying way
life is between the tribes on the steppe. He doesn't want to
be anyone's slave again, either, so after the successful
rescue of his wife he becomes a steppe warrior, followed by
a khan. He wants to unify all the tribes under one khan and
break with tradition, to assign responsibility according to
peoples' abilities rather than their kinship to him. This
new way of doing things, and his new laws that applied to
him as well, inspired so much loyalty and contentment among
his ever-increasing followers that not one deserted under
his command.

The Wolf Chief

Temujin takes the name Genghis or Chingiss Khan, meaning
strong or wolf chief. After establishing the Mongol Nation
in 1206 he keeps honing his incredible military tactics in
the Mongol World War that lasted five decades. He breaks
with tradition all over the place, not only in having no
cavalry or artillery, but in their preferred use of
propaganda terrifying a walled city into submission. They
hated bloodshed and personal combat, would not torture
or mutilate or rape, would often trick their foes before
they attacked, and learned to loot after winning the battle.
All loot was divided evenly among them and captives were put
to work according to their ability. When the loot became
plentiful, Genghis began trading with other nations and
establishing trade routes. He did not simply want to conquer
the world on an ego trip, but to institute a global order
based on free trade, a single internatonal law, religious
tolerance and a universal alphabet.

Statistics of how many people they killed in their war were
usually highly exaggerated with their approval, as they were
of much smaller numbers than who they conquered and only
their propaganda, craftiness and innovative warfare helped
them to win. As they did so, they collected and passed all
of the skills from them to the next, establishing cultural
communication, greater trade and more advanced civilization.

Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as any man
in history, thirty countries holding over 3 billion
people, which created a new world order and ushered in the
Renaissance in Europe. Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492
not to find America, but in the hope of finding the
collapsed Mongol Empire for his Spanish queen. If you wonder
why it finally collapsed under the descendants of Genghis,
it's a very sad story you should read for yourselves. I was
entranced by it.

Unfortunately, starting in the late 1700s with
Voltaire in a political play of his, The Orphan of China,
Genghis Khan became known as a brutal barbarian jealous of
'the superior virtues of civilization' and Mongols as a
curse to scientists and a scapegoat for many nations'
failures. China and Japan were to be feared for how they
were contaminating the world. Most recently the Taliban
murdered the descendants of the Mongol army that had lived
for 8 centuries there, just because the American invasion
reminded them of the Mongols.

I've already jabbered long enough on this excellent 2004
book of 271 pages. Weatherford has done a magnificent job
researching the history of the Mongols and made it
completely fascinating in Genghis Khan and the Making of
the Modern World. I'm checking out his other books like
Indian Givers and Savages and Civilizations.

Jack Weatherford, Anthropology, and his book Genghis Khan and the
Making of the Modern World, continue to attract media attention. Weatherford
was interviewed on the Voice of America's daily international call-in talk show
"Talk to America." The book was listed as the favorite book of Indian Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh. (OutlookIndia.com India - December 17, 2004) The
book is listed as the number five selection in a list of Top Adult Nonfiction
Titles. (Pioneer Press - December 31, 2004) Weatherford is mentioned in
an article on some of the Best Books of the Year. (Weekend Standard Hong Kong
- January 1-26, 2005)
http://www.macalester.edu/bulletin/details8.html